THINK that kid who skips school, drinks alcohol and gets into trouble with police has no future?
You could be very wrong.

That drug-dealing truant could be the next Bill Gates, according to a study which equates risk-taking behaviour with the sort of qualities in some of the world's most successful business moguls.

The National Bureau of Economic Research published a study on successful self-starters which concludes a combination of intelligence and "aggressive/illicit/risk-taking tendencies as a youth accounts for both entry into entrepreneurship and the comparative earnings of entrepreneurs".

The study by Ross Levine of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, and Yona Rubinstein of the London School of Economics looked at self-employed owners of corporations and found learning ability mixed with "break-the-rules" attitude was "tightly linked with entrepreneurship".

The study paper - Smart and Illicit: Who becomes an entrepreneur and does it pay? - found "the incorporated self-employed have a distinct combination of cognitive, noncognitive, and family traits".

The kind of risk-taking behaviour shown in these types of successful people during adolescence included skipping classes, underage drinking and cannabis use, stealing, assault and gambling.

While getting into trouble with the police could also be a predictor for a poor future, the youthful risk takers with a successful future tended to come from higher-income, two-parent families with educated, often working mothers.

They did well at school and had good self-esteem.

"It is the high-ability person who tends to 'break-the-rules' (as measured by the degree to which the person engaged in illicit activities before the age of 22) who is especially likely to become a successful entrepreneur," the study says.

It quotes Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was a teenage hacker, saying "misbehaviour is very strongly correlated with and responsible for creative thought".